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Abridged aims to commission and publish contemporary/experimental poetry plus contemporary art freed from exhibition ties and especially commissioned for the magazine. We encourage poets/artists to investigate the articulation of ‘Abridged’ themes. For example our last few issues have been concerned with Time, Absence, Magnolia and Nostalgia. These themes focus on contemporary concerns in a rapidly changing society. We are offering an alternative and complete integration of poetry, art and design. We experiment continually. We also stray into the exhibition format producing contemporary, innovative and challenging work accompanied by a free publication. www.abridgedonline.com
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Abridged 0–22
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Page 3
Contents
Abridged 0 – 22
Cover Image: Keith O’Faolain, Love Is...(2011)
Simon Leyland 05
Ailbhe Ní Bhriain 06
Mark Stopforth 07
Dorothy Smith 08
Peter Kearns 09
Maria McKinney 10
Gerard Smyth 11
Samantha Ratanarat 12
Gregory McCartney 13
Louise Manifold 14
Howard Giskin 15
Leonie Tang 16
Gerald Dawe 17
Noel Heaney 19
Fiona Larkin 21
Maurice Devitt 22
Paola Bernardelli 23
Mike Alexander 24
Simon Perchik 25
Ailbhe Ní Bhriain 26
Simon Jones 28
Louise Manifold 29
Tori Grant Welhouse 30
Samantha Ratanarat 31
Mike Alexander 32
Yvonne Kennan 34
Maeve O’Sullivan 35
Gerard Smyth 36
Leonie Tang 37
Clare McCotter 38
Cathal Duane 39
Kevin Graham 40
Ailbhe Ní Bhriain 41
Fabian Peake 42
David Farquhar 43
Angela France 44
We have built an entire economy on the enigmatic pull of nostalgia, on that ‘heap
of broken images’ that intersect like shattered glass on our consciousness.
The recent burial of said economy is proof of the flimsy, fickle nature of nostalgia.
Nostalgia is a ‘dead tree’ that we cling to in desperate hope that some kernel of a
longed for but ancient reality will drop from it.
It is a cyanide pill that offers us no hope of touching what it is that we have lost.
It is the air breathed by the past, whispered in our ears on frosty November nights.
It promises reprieve but delivers nothing we can touch. It cannot be trusted.
It cannot be believed.
Nostalgia is a Loaded Gun.
Next: Abridged 0 – 20: Abandoned Clare; Abridged 0 – 25: Desire and Dust
.
abridged is Maria Campbell (Editor) & Gregory McCartney (Project Coordinator)no part of this publication may be reproduced without permission
copyright remains with authors/artistsabridged is a division of The Chancer Corporation
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c/o Verbal Arts Centre, Stable Lane and Mall Wall, Bishop Street Within, Derry - Londonderry BT48 6PUTel: 028 71266946 verbalmedia.co.uk
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‘You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief’
Abridged 0 - 22: Nostalgia is a Loaded Gun
Abridged 0 – 22
Page 4
In Lieu of Coin
Go blanket the green belt market garden
Search the forest for the ancient cummerbund
Kiss the Coral sea goodbye
Shake hands with the new gardener
Shed a tear in the waiting pond
Fly a kite enamelled in a distant gaze
Get out from under this heavy template
Slightly giddy like a frontage road
Withstand the brutal love of the plaintive estuary
Dispel and fold the caution horses
Balance the safety matches,
Lourdes side of the severed cupola
Wage war with flecked ions in extraordinary vapours
When night comes to unhappy cities
The land is dark and absent
A man climbing a mountain
Yodelling inside a silo
Artesian springs leap nebulae
All phantasmagorical
The humming of circumflex
Laughs heartily along with the structures of everyday life
Which build upon each other and rebuild
The constructions of cities subsides
Hours turn on a gigantic plumb line
Dangling over enchanted tarpaulin
Mesmer lost track of the beam here
Monument to loss
Surge and bewildered
Airtight as the drum
Crows fly by at night
Simon Leyland
Abridged 0 – 22
Page 5Page 5
Ailbhe Ní Bhriain, Still from The Suspension Room video series, 2010 Courtesy Domobaal Gallery, London
Abridged 0 – 22
Page 6
The Anatomy of Leaves
Summer, as a child, sat beneath
a canopy of cool oak trees,
the picnic rug a plaid runway for wasps.
Adult conversations washed over me
like the soft whispered breeze of the leaves.
Bored, I’d start to pick out the flesh of a leaf,
a sculpture in reverse,
taking out more than was put in.
Not some daisy chain poesy,
this was a lesson in basic anatomy,
to search out the spine, the vein and the artery.
Carefully I teased out each green stomata,
lifting the lung from its root.
Often a ventricle snapped,
scrunched up, collapsed,
and in a fit of frustration,
teeth spat out hissed blasphemies,
no choice now but to start all over again.
Once completed, the skeletal membrane,
held up and pinned in the light, was as fine
as the lead in a cathedral window,
and the sun and the air poured through,
taking all the colors around, within.
Mark Stopforth
Abridged 0 – 22
Page 7
Dorothy Smith, The Big Machine, Oil on Canvas, 2010
Abridged 0 – 22
Page 8
Page 9
Static Anticipation
Yellow claw menacing-static-still no one about
Bright bits of tin ragged red trees
Machine-scene of cold green soft comfort
Mist metal of paint-sounds to miss
Oil-drip leaf-smells, years of rotting needles
Cab coat over the chair heat-radio-thoughts
Sealed comfort carved out to be happy
Don’t engage worm and slugs and wood lice moving
Silent-busy person… who left the scene
Do they ever want to come back
Here do they work entirely alone
Stuff on the ground waiting to be crushed
Wicklow sky-gentle and soft and lonely
Picture of anticipation-layer sinking into layer
Peter Kearns
Abridged 0 – 22
Page 9
Maria McKinney, Puppy dog box, gouache paint on cardboard, 2010
Abridged 0 – 22
Page 10
A Sixties Dive
In a Sixties dive, a Sixties turntable
was spinning the vinyl: the poet from Montreal
saluted the Sisters of Mercy, the troubadour
from Minnesota was pitying the Poor Emigrant.
To pass the boredom, girls were dancing wildly,
humming the chorus of a song from Merseyside.
It was a place to go on Saturday night to slake a thirst,
tie a love-knot or to find a consolation.
A Sixties dive, a house divided into rooms of homely
exile: dull surroundings of plywood and Formica
but beckoning with its blandishments
– German wine, home brew, apple cider.
Gerard Smyth
Abridged 0 – 22
Page 11
Samantha Ratanarat, Dancing with Doggy, 2010
Abridged 0 – 22
Page 12
The Stubble of Time
These little lonely moments, the stubble of time
They coarsen the soul
Beached, uncomfortable on pebble
I feel the sun tear into my skin
Black-clad among the naked and burning
I read Plath and take notes
One reads ‘awkward inferno’
This sea could sell used cars
Offering solace and substitute sex
Eyes squint in the sodium haze
Someone undresses in front of me
Matter-of-factly
In every aspect foreign
I feel old and oddly indecent
Luminous and lonely
As I intently focus on Sylvia
My dead summer companion
Declares the air a mill of hooks
On this stone bed I am the sandman
The cross and the crescent moon
Sinister, suspect, alone; a fragment
Of dystopia; a universal irritant
That makes them seek out lovers
The beautiful bodies of others
Or just a sudden shower
Shivering, disturbing their bathing
Quickly failing
Gregory McCartney
Abridged 0 – 22
Page 13
Louise Manifold, Natural Cabinet Lizard/Wunderkammer Series, Digital Lambda Print 2010
Abridged 0 – 22
Page 14
Great Pan is Dead
Plutarch writes of the father of Aemilianus the orator
Who tells the following story: It was evening when the
Wind dropped as a ship drifted near Ionian Paxi
A voice calling Thalmus the ship’s Egyptian pilot is heard from the shore
Twice he sat silent then finally replied
He was told: Announce Great Pan is dead; and this he did, words ringing
Towards the wooded shore; a cry of lamentation broke loose
Amazement too, from the stunned crew
A story soon spread to Rome: Summoned, humble Thalmus
Stood shaking before Tiberius Caesar,
Who convinced of the truth of the story caused an inquiry to be made
And what are we to make of this, a fragment?
That Pan, like Humbaba went down hard, whispering
Nature death, yet Pan, sweet child of earth
Tiberias’ scholars said, child of Hermes and Penelope,
Is merely youngest of the gods.
Howard Giskin
Abridged 0 – 22
Page 15
Abridged 0 – 22
Page 16
Abridged 0 – 22
Page 17
Opposite: Leonie Tang, Reference ND/1/4, Series 1: Photographic Negatives, Subseries 4: Street/Landscape Photogrsaphy, 2010
Déjà-vu
(Terence Chartres Bradshaw 1932-2006)
I should say first of all that the Bank of Ireland
on the corner of North Street next to where your pal,
Carly’s mother ran the photographic studio
we all went to for annual portraits until that stopped,
in the sixties, that that wonderful art-deco
building is closed and boarded-up, the doors
scrawled over – what do you expect after
all the mayhem? – and the Grand Central Hotel,
you used to frequent in the snazziest of snazzy suits,
the film star look – it went years ago, alas,
replaced by the dire shopping mall, no GPO,
no grand hotel, just the date stones of buildings,
laid in the nineteenth century when the city was all gothic,
and your Mother and Father were conceived and started
to make their way towards each other, and by the time
you came about, the wars began, ‘The less said the better’.
Now, a short life later, at the drop of a hat,
a mere seventy years on, you go and bow out on us,
the messenger boy, the boy entrant, the spark, the dancer,
the chatter-upper, the dab hand, the butterfly, the only boy –
you go and push off with no fly-past, no Dam Busters,
but an unceremonious last tour, to your old school,
your old buddies, like boys again in the Forces,
the white cuffs showing just so, the quiff,
the breast pocket handkerchief,
and always the laugh, (the jaded look came later),
sitting where I am now, your feet jive
to the music of time, swiveling this way and that,
on the steps one day of the Central library
you approached me and my mates –
‘My uncle Terry’, a whiff of drink taken in Mc Glade’s,
your grandfather’s spot, or Hercules of the horseshoe bar.
Daydreams and marijuana in the Waterworks,
tripping down Limestone road,
the RUC band playing in Alexander Park,
lying stretched out in the Grove,
for that was the Summer of Love,
blue skies all the way from Napoleon’s Nose to Scrabo,
cadging admission to the Small Faces,
Pink Floyd in the Ulster Hall, Hendrix in the Whitla,
‘All along the Watchtower’- and hearing your step in late,
about four in the morning, the light in the back room
had started to spill from ceiling to floor,
in your wake, cigarette smoke and aftershave,
like it was only yesterday: women pushing huge prams,
men in suits with lunch boxes and, of course,
The Sky at Night, which I will never forget,
from my little perch, my secret eerie at the top of the house.
Abridged 0 – 22
Page 18
But no one asked after you, or said Hello,
they just kept on - and who would blame them,
in the squalls of rain before the sunlight came
along with a sudden gust up North Street and down by
discount shops and ragged car parks and the view
all the way to where we once lived like everyone else,
or so we thought, swimming away in our own underworld,
the Czech vase in the bay window, the sun-blinds,
the grandfather clock on the landing, waking up
in arctic bedrooms to milky skies and freezing mornings,
everyone heading to work, on packed buses -
could it have been so, through autumn and winter,
spring and summer? - women sitting on spruce porches
in behind their front gardens and the kids,
like a breed unto themselves, hanging out down the back,
when the nights lengthened and you’d arrive in,
from somewhere very different than this orderly world
that’s gone now - like you collapsed in a heap
on the bathroom floor, like you acting the lig,
‘Who goes there?’, like the pop of the gas-fire
being lit in granny’s bedroom,
the white columns that turned sky-blue,
the scraggy nights of racing clouds,
the kitchen lights going on, one after another,
at the same time, the shadows on the ceiling,
the shining car parked where it shouldn’t have been,
the sound of someone whistling down the lane
and the whole thing starting up all over again,
every morning without fail, come sun, rain or hail,
without you or I, without the blink of an eye,
the blinds drawn for mourning –
that’s what should have been done,
Noel Heaney, I’m not so good with faces anymore, Mixed media, 210mm x 297mm, 2010
Page 19
Abridged 0 – 22
all the way down the gardens and avenues,
just for you who’d sailed through,
smoozing with the best of them until demob’ came
with the banner WELCOME HOME
and you’re back on Civvy Street…
That day I swear I saw you all of a sudden,
the weather turned from foul storm-cloud
to brilliant sunshine like a flash of light
and in a second gone as we beetled along
to the megastores in one-time fashion houses,
the fast food outlets on the mosaic ground floors,
the medical hall, the Ulster Club, the Scottish Prudential,
the red brick luminous in the falling rain,
stumbling up the stairs in fits of laughter,
gone like all the people dressed for the part,
gone like a ship slipping out to sea into the dark,
gone like that Easter break, rolling eggs down
the hillside until they smashed into smithereens,
the long silence of Sunday afternoons,
the fog horns blasting in the New Year,
the slow erosions of that life into fear
by which time you had well and truly gone,
and what remains, who can ever tell? –
to see it all again - the turning in a street corner,
the light on a landing, a door that was never
quite flush, the names cut one summer
in the softened flashing of the top window,
and all the things that seem the same,
moon light on rooftop, the shouted question,
a slow silhouetted figure that moves
across the blinds, the brazen air of early spring
as everything becomes new once more.
Gerald Dawe
Abridged 0 – 22
Page 20
‘Déjà-vu’ means ‘already seen’ from Greek παρα ‘para,’ ‘near, against, contrary to’+ μνήμη “mnēmē,” “memory”. The poem was originally published in Poetry Review (UK).
Fiona Larkin, Full of Holes, 2010
Abridged 0 – 22
Page 21
Abridged 0 – 22
Page 22
Letters from Australia
I remember
how you spoke of emigration,
as a devil
you could exorcise
with a short-stay visa
and a notebook of addresses;
and how, in the later months,
you would talk about it
endlessly, your tongue
tripped by guilt, your arguments
assertive yet unconvincing.
“It’s the quality of life
that will bring me back. The people
and the quality of life”.
You left Dublin
on one of those brittle February days,
when the city seems in final,
frozen suspense,
before the uncertainty of Spring,
and passed the walk
between check-in and boarding, babbling nervously
of your return, as though the journey
was an unavoidable blip
to be broached
and dismissed as soon as possible.
One kiss, a magnetic hug,
and you were gone, your promise
to write left echoing in the empty corridor.
The first letter arrived
with almost indecent haste,
a forlorn despatch
from the back of an airport taxi -
the familiar bouncy style, the dearth
of punctuation, the words careering
wildly across sparsely-filled pages -
“... they don’t understand me
I speak too fast
I had to repeat the address three times
and it’s so hot. How I miss
those comfortably cold February mornings”.
Then nothing
for a year, just a cursory
“Greeting from the Gold Coast”
and a “G’Day from the Reef”.
Nothing,
until today,
when a twenty-page update
on your life, belly-flopped
through my letter-box
and informed me concisely,
somewhere between a dissertation
on barbecues and a cathartic remark
on the Irishness of Australia,
that you had met someone
and wouldn’t be coming back.
Maurice Devitt
Abridged 0 – 22
Paola Bernardelli, Loaded, 2010
Page 23
Abridged 0 – 22
Page 24
LA MORTE
I walk the woods, still wet
after rain the night before, the
first release after long abstinence,
talking to myself, an imaginary lecture
on Symbolist obsession, iconography,
Classical references, rape, a swan
feather adrift downstream, a languid
Ophelial lily reflecting millennial
sky, how it was all classified as
erotica, then legitimized as literature.
I look for a body in the ground cover,
pale as it should be at the base
of a black oak. One stroke of early
sunlight cuts the glade to knock & hold
her down. Translucent eiderdown.
Mike Alexander
*
A click and its likeness
can’t change, curled
the way rain yellows
though you hold on
almost make out the grin
that could be yours
--it’s been years, minutes
and even with your arms apart
you have forgotten the smell
the fleece-lined gloves
filled with dry leaves
half paper, half iron
half pinned to this snapshot
still bleeding from a thumbtack
and your shoulders
--you don’t recognize the hand
left holding up the sky
to look for the other
bringing it a morning
ripped from wings and mountainside
that can’t close or open
or dry :the rust
still waving, gutting the cheeks
whatever day it was.
Simon Perchik
Centrespread: Ailbhe Ní Bhriain, Still from Untitled video diptych, 2008 Courtesy Domobaal Gallery, London
Abridged 0 – 22
Page 25
Abridged 0 – 22
Page 26
Abridged 0 – 22
Page 27
21 York Street
I went to York Street
Saw the house where I was born
And watched the river flow
Under the bridge where clocks were turning
Women talking dogs were barking
Watched the faces come and go.
And all the words like bubbles rise
Advice and orders tender lies the truth
Don’t tell me which way I should go.
Outside a butchers shop
I saw a girl who looked a lot
Like someone that I used to know.
I recognized expressions
Eyes of boys in men forgotten now
God knows how many years ago.
And as I paused
Deep breathing air
My voice it roared
But wavered only softly down the street that I call home.
Simon Jones
Abridged 0 – 22
Page 28
Louise Manifold, Bottled Bird/Wunderkammer series Digital Lambda Print 2010
Abridged 0 – 22
Page 29
Abridged 0 – 22
Page 30
Games We Played
Red Rover, red rover.
The object was simple,
intention an engine.
Could outside get in?
Could the chain be broken?
Twilight sputtered with
impossible light.
There was no holding back,
acceleration on two legs,
a tanned careening towards
the underbelly crucifix
of locked forearms.
The sky, knocked ajar,
clotheslined all forward motion.
Kick the can.
The countdown scattered.
Lonely numerics
called out to dusk.
Could lost be found?
Could the hidden be discovered?
There was breathing
in the boxwood,
the slow drift of leafage,
heaving with the body.
Far away from home
an eruption for the finish,
moon one pale sourball,
can clattered across the surface.
Redlight, greenlight.
The back was turned.
Friends grew in the grass,
pallid as mushrooms.
Could boldness rule?
Could the brave win out?
Feet emptied the night air.
The axis was aware.
Bareness made the difference.
Movement was naked,
a slow tickle,
lunging towards the turned shoulder,
flashing surprise.
How muscles had memory.
Tori Grant Welhouse
Samantha Ratanarat,The Twins, pencil drawing on Fabriano, 2010
Abridged 0 – 22
Page 31
Abridged 0 – 22
Page 32
DU TEMPS PERDU
A good son
keeps his developed
smile, Kodak, regardless,
staring into the flash cube sun
behind her. I flinch,
my jaw unclenching, out of focus.
She places herself so she blazes.
It hurts to look at her,
even after she takes away
my glasses, my tortoise shell,
& backs me up to the studio wall.
No blindfold. No final words.
ii
Over the mantel,
dark presences, human trophies
of a great white hunter, glossy-eyed,
decorate our living
room, the television-flicker
over our faces. Great-grandmother
sits for her portrait, corseted, Victorian.
Our mother, a girl, unblinking in military
uniform, holds at rigorous attention,
clarinet in gloved grasp. All our
baby pictures, graduations, framed,
crowd too close to radiance.
Abridged 0 – 22
Page 33
iii
Victorians commissioned
child portraits,
captured in velveteen diminutive
of adult couture, plush, hand-
tailored to the tiniest detail, a favorite
toy, a complimentary nosegay, a grammar
book, caught in mid-play or mid-study,
impeccably mannered, color-
coordinated, rouge blush discretely
added to pallid cheeks with the painter’s
brush, anything to help surviving
family remember.
iv
Early photographers hid under
a cloak of darkness, pried a lens cap
off its lens, then asked the bright world
to stop in its tracks, at least until
the cap was back in place. How many
lives did your exposures save from death?
Primitive souls, stolen, sold on a black
market, my tribe,
we squint, blur, sabotage
your attempts to take us alive. We know
what hungers hide behind the cloak.
Mike Alexander
Yvonne Kennan, Wanting Contact, 2010
Abridged 0 – 22
Page 34
Manicure
This is a springtime poem for you, mother,
about the happenings of last Christmas
when you had to leave the family home
after a fall. In hospital for a cure,
you left behind the unopened gifts,
your husband, the house and your life.
Music’s been a big part of your life.
The Lehmann, a bequest from your mother,
kick-started many sing-songs, a true gift;
taking turns, with harmonies at Christmas.
Now the doctors are administering their cure,
and we’re hoping you’ll soon be home.
It’s strange not having you at home,
where the accoutrements of your life
lie all around. We’re in need of a cure
to ease your absence, mother.
You were missing at Christmas
your blank new diary, our gifts.
I’ve kept all your letters and gifts
in the various places I’ve called home,
and every year a sweet card at Christmas.
You’ve nurtured me throughout my life,
now it’s my turn to try and mother
you, my role to heal and cure.
“Less of the manic and more of the cure”
was what you said when I gave you gifts
of nail clippers and emery board, mother,
that day when your mind was clearly home.
No guarantee it will stay that way for life,
let alone until next Christmas.
Where will you be next Christmas?
Will you still be seeking to cure
The late depredations of this life
that you’ve lived, so rich in gifts?
Will you be back in your own home,
or in another suitable for grandmother?
Mother, your best gifts didn’t come
Christmas-wrapped: your lifestyle,
your place in your own home secure.
Maeve O’Sullivan
Abridged 0 – 22
Page 35
Page 36
Opposite: Leonie Tang, Ref ND/1/1, Series 1: Photographic Negatives, Subseries 1: Air Force and Military, 2010
Sitric’s Kingdom
In Sitric’s kingdom our games were simple:
Spin-the-bottle, Blind-man’s buff.
Every night behind the infirmary
the sun went down but never in a hurry.
That’s where I wore my sheriff’s star,
my Robin-of-Sherwood hat, where I saw the hearse
and funeral car taking forever to pass,
heard carols at Christmas in the Church of St Nicholas
and great bells that shook our window
on the world of trader, merchant,
brewery men delivering stout;
the god of repairs who could mend and fix.
The midwife too who lost count
of cries she heard for mother’s milk.
Gerard Smyth
Abridged 0 – 22
Abridged 0 – 22
Page 37
Something Back
in memory of Julia McAteer (née McGuigan)
Today your daughter said everyone wants something back
the site she sold where an old house tilted like a womb
our now gone backfield that oblong of pristine green
the root of a lushing lilac bush earthed for a hundred years
a white-scarred gelding traded how many snows before
you died gaining in granite a syllable you never had in life
an absence filled with ibis and orioles and waxwings
your name in that girl’s ear a rare fleeting foreign thing
you would never have claimed your own anymore
than you did the two bedrooms sleeping five
the living room clean of ornament and antimacassar
the two postage stamps of grass separated by a short path
where a boy hatched joy from a gnarled brush shaft
the books you read but did not own or want to own
circulating like wandering stars through silver poplars
their light barred always from your grandson’s satchel
empty of paper and pencil those tools of an intellect
I doubt you would have wanted back knowing
his dawns break in water clear and deep and wide
where no man with line and plumb will ever come.
Clare McCotter
Opposite: Cathal Duane, Untitled, 2010
Abridged 0 – 22
Page 38
Abridged 0 – 22
Page 40
A Failure
What struck me was not the flat palm
or the brace of a raised arm, but the shock
that they could drop and soothe like a balm
the wordless rooms we shared, and rock
me until its rhythm caught his breath.
In winter, this lent me precious heat.
I floated through nightmares of terrific death;
of driving off the pier to beat
the smell of my own blood, crashing
into a darkness that swallowed me whole.
I awoke like a flame, tongueless, clawing
in the suffocating damp of my body’s soul,
begging the meek cushion of light
to turn night into day and day into night.
Kevin Graham
Ailbhe NÍ Bhriain, Video Still form Palimpsest video series, 2008 Courtesy Domobaal Gallery, London
Abridged 0 – 22
Page 41
Abridged 0 – 22
Page 42
Away in Texas
Are those the monarchs, tilting angle-winged
between skyscrapers? I hold my hands in imitation.
‘Where?’ he says, ‘I’ve seen none.’
But they are there in thousands, a few at a time,
the sun spitting orange through stained glass veins.
I keep seeing Medina; Ephraim, I think.
He’s upside-down today, still smiling
in his Korean War army cap. Twice
since I’ve been here he’s died – right way up
both times. I don’t want the others, only Medina.
And all I can see of Shuckey Duckey
is the glitter of his golden jacket in the dark;
he’s upside down too, yet from this angle
I could swear he’s a dummy. I’ll ask our friend
the photographer. She took the picture.
How come I don’t know this Howdy Doody?
Y’all dropped his name on the concrete,
oblivious to the way letters scatter. Something
to do with early kids’ TV (what does it matter?) –
a kind of Archie Andrews with teeth.
We all made an evening of red hair and freckles.
By sundown the big room had swallowed the dead,
the comedians and the cardboard streets.
I carried the fisherman across the floor
and laid it, gun drawn, by the door.
Fabian Peake David Farquhar, Untitled from Fatigue Detail, 2010
Abridged 0 – 22
David Farquhar, Untitled from Fatigue Detail, 2010
Page 43
Fishing
He holds it by its tail
scrapes a knife down to the dull eye
Silver showers to grass
catches sun
vanishes --
blood and slime on the table
Scales clung to hairs on his brown arm
float on the air
fall from my eyes
and I am not five
a long way from his garden.
I see him now
through this cracked
mirror -- distorted
silvered
Angela France
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Mike Alexander lives in Houston, Texas. He has recently published in River Styx, Measure, & Southword. Seven Towers Ltd. (Dublin) will be publishing his first full-length collection, The Necessary Slice, in 2012.
Paola Bernardelli is an Italian photographer who’s been living and working in Derry since 2002. She’s currently completing a Master of Fine Art at the University of Ulster, Belfast.
Gerald Dawe’s most recent collections include Lake Geneva and Points West. His Conversations: Poets & Poetry will be published later this year. He is a Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin.
Maurice Devitt is a retired banker, who completed the Becoming a Poet course with Faber & Faber last year and is now reading for an MA in Poetry Studies at Mater Dei. Cathal Duane is a visual artist and graphic designer living and working out of the West of Ireland, with a degree from the Sculpture and Digital Media course at G.M.I.T, 2010. He has worked on a wide range of fine art and graphic design projects, such as the Adaptation Project for Culture Night, Galway 2010 and the N.U.I.G arts festival Muscailt, 2007.
David Farquhar, is a recent graduate from the University of Ulster. He is interested in endurance and the exploration of human limits, David Farquhar’s photographs search for an honest account of human experience where strength faces vulnerability. He has a show with Artlink at Fort Dunree, Co. Donegal in April 2011.
Angela France writes poems, reads poems, studies poems, edits poetry journals and runs a poetry reading series but the day job sometimes gets in the way. Her second collection, ‘Occupation’ is available from Ragged Raven Press and a pamphlet, ‘Lessons in Mallemaroking’ will be out from Nine Arches Press in Summer 2011.
Howard Giskin has taught in the Department of English at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina since 1989. He has co-edited An Introduction
to Chinese Culture through the Family (SUNY Press, 2001), edited a volume of Chinese folktales (NTC/ Contemporary, 1997), written on Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges, and published poetry. He has taught in Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America, and lives with his wife Vicki in Millers Creek, North Carolina.
Kevin Graham has been published in Poetry Ireland Review, The SHOp, Magma, The Stinging Fly and others. In 2010 he won Arts Council Literature Bursary Award. He lives and works in Dublin.
Tori Grant Welhouse earned her MFA in Creative Writing from Antioch University in London. Her work has appeared in Children, Churches and Daddies, Literary Mama, The Greensboro Review, and she was a recent runner-up in firstwriter.com’s Eighth International Poetry Competition.
Noel Heaney likes to make lists, incessantly, but tends to misplace them just as regularly. Born in Derry, he is a Masters graduate in Design Communication, currently living and working in Vancouver.
Simon Huw Jones is a vocalist and lyric writer. He was born in Birmingham in 1960 but grew up in a hamlet in rural Worcestershire where, in 1980, he formed the alternative rock band ‘And also the trees’ with his brother Justin. Since then AATT have released ten studio albums and toured extensively in Europe and the USA. He has also worked as a commercial and industrial photographer and has exhibited photographs he took whilst working for a humanitarian organization in India. He now lives with his family in Geneva, Switzerland.More Information about Simon and the band can be found at www.andalsothetrees.co.uk andw w w . f a c e b o o k . c o m / p a g e s / a n d - a l s o - t h e -trees/71836477700
Yvonne Kennan, originally from Dublin she completed a degree at Limerick School of Art and Design and the MFA at the University of Ulster in 2009. Currently working with PS2 Gallery and Belfast Exposed. The work considers choice and structure in contemporary society.
Contributors
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Peter Kearns graduated from Trinity College with an English Honours degree in 1990 and followed this with an MA in Film & TV Studies at Dublin City University and a Higher Diploma in Adult & Community Education from Maynooth College. In the mid 1990’s Peter established THE WORKHOUSE, a disability arts support for research/development and training of disabled people throughout Ireland, Europe and Asia. He is a film/theatre director and writer & disabled academic/activist, plus part-time lecturer.
Fiona Larkin, born in Dublin 1976, is an artist based in Flax Art Studios, Belfast who’s work primarily finds form in video, photography, action and improvisation.
Simon Leyland is a ne`er do well and lives in a small cottage in Connemara
Louise Manifold’s work draws its origins from over looked and unbelievable subject matter- ranging from rare delusional illnesses, obscure phenomena and manifestations of medieval melancholy as a means in which to comment upon human awareness in contemporary culture. Born in Galway Louise holds a first class honors degree in Sculpture from the Galway/Mayo institute of Technology, and MA in Fine Art from Central St Martins Collage, London, England. She has been the recipient of numerous grant awards including The Arts Council of Ireland Bursary awards 2010, Galway City Council grant awards, Culture Ireland Grant. In 2009, she was one of the four artists short-listed in A.I.B. prize. Louise is currently undertaking a guest fellowship at the International Studio and Curatorial Program, in Brooklyn New York. Clare McCotter’s haiku, tanka and haibun have been published in the leading short form journals in Ireland, Britain, Canada, the United States, India and Australia. She won the Irish Haiku Society Award 2010, and was commended in the Haiku Presence Award 2010. In the same year she judged the British Haiku Awards. In 2005 she was awarded a doctoral degree from the University of Ulster. She has published numerous peer-reviewed articles on Beatrice Grimshaw’s travel writing and fiction. Home is Kilrea, Co. Derry.
Maria McKinney makes sculpture, drawing and installation. Exhibitions include the Lab Gallery, Dublin (2010, solo), the Context Gallery, Derry (2008, solo); Ev+a, Limerick (2010), Futures, R.H.A. (2009), Preponderance of the Small, The Douglas Hyde Gallery 3 (2009), Resolutions at the Katzan Arts Centre, Washington DC (2007). She received an Arts Council award in 2010 and is currently a member of Broadstone Studios, Dublin.
Ailbhe Ní Bhriain studied at the Crawford College of Art & Design, Cork, the Royal College of Art, London, and Kingston University, Surrey. She has shown widely both internationally and nationally and was selected for Futures 10 at the RHA in 2010. She was a recipient of the Arts Council of Ireland Visual Arts Bursary in 2010 and is currently working towards a forthcoming solo exhibition at Domobaal, London. She lectures at the Crawford College of Art & Design, Cork.
Keith O’Faolain is from Western Ireland. Sometimes he tries to exercise the right side of his brain, most often through image, sound and code.
Maeve O’Sullivan’s poems and haiku are widely published, and she is a former poetry winner at Listowel Writers’ Week. She is a member of the Poetry Divas. Her first collection, Initial Response by Alba Publishing and will be launched in Dublin in early April.
Fabian Peake is an artist and writer living and working in London. He trained at Chelsea College of Art and The Royal College of Art. He taught for many years in the Fine Art Department of Manchester Metropolitan University where he was a Senior Lecturer. He has exhibited in Great Britain and internationally. He has published in magazines in England and U.S.A. Carnage Hall magazine, New York and Silver Web magazine, Tallahassee. He has written introductions to childrens’ books and special edition poetry books and written for the Guardian newspaper. A pamphlet of poems was published by Manchester Metropolitan University to accompany one of Fabian Peake’s exhibitions. His work can be found at www.fabianpeake.co.uk and http://www.ubu.com/ubu/unpub/Unpub_053_Peake.pdf
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Simon Perchik is an attorney whose poems have appeared in Partisan Review, The New Yorker and elsewhere. For more information, including his essay “Magic, Illusion and Other Realities” and a complete bibliography, please visit his website at www.simonperchik.com.
Samantha Ratanarat is a graduate of The National College of Art and Design with a BA in Fine Art. Her work is primarily drawing-based and explores themes of behavioural restrictions, social boundaries, and the notion of ‘taboo’. Ratanarat has participated in inter-continental print exchanges with Maine College of Art USA, and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia. The Twins won the joint James White Award for Drawing in the RDS Student Art Awards 2010. Recent group exhibitions include the Royal Dublin Society Student Art Awards 2010 at the RDS, Ballsbridge; and the Monster Truck Christmas Extravaganza V in Temple Bar.
Dorothy Smith has been a full time artist for the last 15 years in which time she has had 7 one person exhibitions in the Hallward Gallery, Dublin, Origin Gallery, Dublin and most recently in the Courthouse Arts Centre in Co. Wicklow. Dorothy is a regular exhibitor in the Royal Ulster Academy, Royal Hibernian Academy, the Lavit Gallery, Cork, Iontas, Eigse and other selected exhibitions. Her work is in many collections including the New York Public Library Print Collection, University College Dublin and the Irish Contemporary Arts Society. Dorothy has worked in arts management for City Arts Centre, Dublin, Create and Arts Disability Ireland and has facilitated many creative workshops and training programmes.
Gerard Smyth was born in Dublin where he still lives and works as Managing Editor with The Irish Time. His poetry has appeared widely in publications in Ireland, Britain, and America, as well as in translation, since the late 1960s. He is the author of seven collections, the most recent of which are The Mirror Tent (Dedalus Press, 2007) and The Fullness of Time, New and Selected Poems (Dedalus Press), published this year. He is a member of Áosdana. www.gerardsmyth.com
Mark Stopforth is currently Head of Art in a school in Gloucestershire and as a practicing artist have had exhibitions around the country including The Royal West of England Academy, Bristol. He have won several poetry competitions since taking up writing last year. His influences include Ted Hughes, Simon Armitage and Norman MacCaig.
Leonie Tang: Edward (‘Ned’) Dunphy (1912 – 2010): The story of Ned Dunphy has never been told, a man of undiscovered talent, viewed in the eyes of most as an eccentric, yet undeniably, one of Ireland’s great photographers. Ned’s life began under British occupation of Ahmednagur, India, on the 17th of April 1912. His parents, Corporal Edward Dunphy and Nora Gilligan returned to Ireland in 1915, where his father served thirty years in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers. From a young age Ned had many vocations, from artist, to photographer, to electrician, and even pro-cyclist. He was a member of several cycling clubs, participated in forming the first bike polo teams in Cork and Dublin, and resided in the top three Irish cyclists from 1933 -1939. During these times he was also employed by companies such as Harland and Wolff aircraft factories and Birkenhead oil refinery, eventually retiring in 1970 from the ESB, pursuing his childhood obsessions with Irish fighter planes and Riley motorcars. Ned’s family background in the military, extensive traveling and diverse cultural upbringing, coupled with his consistent documentary practice has produced a wealth of images that document a standard of ‘Irish life’ from the 1920’s up until the turn of the century. These previously, until now, unpublished works of Ned Dunphy, constitute an expansive collection of personal, historical, political, and cultural documents awaiting interpretation. Artist Leonie Tang is currently working on a project which explores Ned’s archives - ‘Between Memory and Document’ will be presented in association with Donegal Artlink in Fort Dunree this coming May
ABRIDGED STAFFMaria Campbell is Abridged Editor and recent PhD graduate. She admires the 1950/60s rock and roll school of confessional poetry and is still immersed in her hopelessly hedonistic pursuit of happiness. Currently considering Desire and Dust.
Gregory McCartney continues apace the Abridged world domination enterprise, is in the midst of Abandoned Ireland and exploring the Merits of Tracer Fire.
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John Beattie
Denzil Browne
Sarah Edge
David Farquhar
LUXe
Ruth McCartney
Maria McKinney
Tina McLaughlin
Susanne Stich
Leonie Tang
Artlink, Tullyarvan Mill, Mill Lane, Buncrana, Co. DonegalT. 074936 3469 E: [email protected] E: www.artlink.ie
Residencies & projects programmed at the intersection of rural archives,
agrarian industries and contemporary art
artlink-8.indd 1 23/03/2011 13:49
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6 may—1 july, 2011
5-7 artillery streetderry, BT48 6RG
t. +44 028 7137 [email protected]
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